Solving the human race’s worsening water problem requires overcoming what Yu’s film terms the “Hydro-Illogical Cycle,” which is defined by the belief that because most of the Earth’s surface is covered in wet stuff, there’s no problem. As one horrified woman proclaims in a hilarious segment that explores the possibility of marketing recycled and purified sewage water (to be sold under the brand name Porcelain Springs), “This says to me that there’s some shortage I don’t know about. When they show those photographs from space, there’s a lot of water!”

“Last Call at the Oasis” is the latest social-advocacy documentary from Participant Media, whose previous output includes “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Food, Inc.” and “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” along with many other less obvious (and less successful) films. Like most of those movies, it’s adapted from existing material in another format, in this case journalist Alex Prud’homme’s book “The Ripple Effect.” At its best, Participant has been able to marry a message-delivery system to a genuine cinematic experience, and that’s definitely what Yu — an eclectic talent whose work includes the documentary “In the Realms of the Unreal” and the narrative feature “Ping Pong Playa,” along with numerous TV episodes — delivers here. “Oasis” packs in a lot of dire information, but it wraps it in often-spectacular images and cutting-edge graphics, moving from Las Vegas to rural Michigan to the Australian outback to the nearly depleted waters of the Jordan River, where the traditional baptismal spot of Jesus has become a fetid swamp contaminated with sewage from a nearby Israeli town.

While the discussion in “Last Call at the Oasis” is never directly about partisan politics or ideology, and although Yu relies mostly on the testimony of respected scientists, this film probably faces a version of the “Inconvenient Truth” problem. It’s largely preaching to the converted, in the sense that if you fail to accept certain basic premises — that climate change is a scientific fact, for example, and that fresh water is a limited and fragile resource that is nearly maxed out on a global scale — then you’ll just blow this off as left-wing fearmongering. In one especially effective section, Yu shows us file footage of Sean Hannity and Sarah Palin ostentatiously taking the side of Latino farmers in California’s Central Valley who were denied irrigation water because of an endangered fish called the Delta smelt. Then she has a scientist explain the larger context: Yes, the smelt is an insignificant species in and of itself, but you can’t consider it on its own. In fact, it’s a key indicator species in an enormous interlocking ecosystem that extends from the rivers and estuaries of the inland West to San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. If the smelt dies, that tells us the whole system is dying.

“Last Call at the Oasis” follows a familiar pattern seen in Participant productions and other social-issue docs, but it does so with such panache and visual variety that I really never felt lectured at. About three-quarters of the film lays out an immensely complicated set of problems and argues that they’re all connected. Agriculture and overdevelopment in the West and Southwest have drained the regions’ reservoirs and aquifers nearly dry, while in many wetter heartland areas the groundwater has been poisoned with exotic industrial toxins and antibiotic-laced cattle manure. Americans’ growing use of all sorts of supplements and pharmaceuticals — many with unknown long-term effects — has created a problem for municipal sewage treatment facilities, which are set up to remove trash and organic waste, not unknown chemical compounds.

Then, of course, Yu has to make the case that it’s not too late for us to clean up this precious resource — along with sunlight, the one absolutely necessary component of life on Earth — and learn to share it better. Erin Brockovich leads a campaign on behalf of poisoned homeowners in Midland, Texas, that leads to new regulations on hexavalent chromium in drinking water. (Yu does not fail to mention that Midland is George W. Bush’s adopted hometown.) The Israeli town stops pumping poop into a Christian holy site, and a coalition of Jordanian, Palestinian and Israeli activists work on a plan to share the Jordan River’s water. Many people, the marketing firm discovers, can be convinced to try Porcelain Springs. (The water we drink every day is recycled sewage, too — we just don’t know where or when it happened.)

If anything, the real downside of “Last Call at the Oasis” comes after the movie is over, when you think back over the rather thin optimism of the last 20 minutes. Sure, Los Angeles will supposedly start piping recycled tap water by the end of this decade, and that’s great and all. But that does nearly nothing to address the fact that only about 1 percent of the planet’s water is drinkable, and 80 to 90 percent of that is used to grow food, often in agricultural regions (like the Central Valley of California) that would otherwise be barren. In case you’re wondering about desalinating seawater, by the way, the answer is no. (It’s like the hydrogen-car solution to the energy crisis, an expensive boondoggle that won’t work.) So we need to figure out how to use a lot less water, very quickly, with a rapidly growing population. Or we just shrug our shoulders and agree with Famiglietti’s two-word prognosis.

“Last Call at the Oasis” is now playing at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema and Sunshine Cinema in New York, and at the Landmark in Los Angeles, with wider release to follow.

A Park Avenue society girl turned Greenwich Village beatnik, Clarke was the pioneering female director in the early history of American independent film, good friends with John Cassavetes, Frederick Wiseman, Jonas Mekas and other downtown legends of the period. If her name and her films have virtually disappeared from history, that’s partly due to institutional sexism, no doubt, and partly to bad luck and bad timing. Milestone Films, which is releasing this version of “The Connection” restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, will go on to release Clarke’s 1960s documentaries “Robert Frost: A Quarrel With the World” and “Portrait of Jason,” an interview with a black gay street hustler, along with her 1985 comeback film “Ornette: Made in America,” about jazz legend Ornette Coleman. (Clarke died in 1997.)

“The Connection,” Clarke’s first feature, was a high-profile project, the screen adaptation of a 1959 Living Theater play by Jack Gelber that had become a cause célèbre despite scathing reviews, attracting uptown artistic types like Leonard Bernstein, Salvador Dalì and Lillian Hellman to take a walk on the wild side. Clarke and her producer, Lewis Allen, funded the film’s $177,000 budget — not so meager, at the time — through the then-unknown tactic of collecting small sums from a large number of investors, establishing a model that endures in micro-budget and mid-budget filmmaking to this day. (Weirdly enough, as Manohla Dargis has reported in the New York Times, former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s parents were among the investors, along with Norman Mailer and architect Philip Johnson.)

But once completed, “The Connection” only screened twice at a single theater on Manhattan’s 45th Street before being closed by New York State’s censorship board. I’m not sure which is more amazing: the fact that New York had a censorship board in the early ’60s that could control what movies the public saw, or the reason for the seizure of “The Connection,” which was two or three uses of the word “shit” (as a synonym for drugs). By the time some edits were made and the ban lifted, public interest had faded, largely because of a swath of unrebutted hostile reviews. Bosley Crowther of the Times, a noted get-off-my-lawn crank of the time, wrote an especially peculiar one in which he praised the actors, the live jazz soundtrack and Clarke’s “bold direction,” but described the film overall as “deadly monotonous, in addition to being sordid and disagreeable.”

I won’t pretend not to understand what Crowther was talking about. “The Connection” remains much better known among jazz fans for its soundtrack album featuring pianist Freddie Redd and saxophonist Jackie McLean (who play live in the film, as they did onstage), than it is among movie buffs as, you know, a film. Clarke should certainly get credit for exploring the faux-documentary format decades before it became a film-school gimmick (the story-within-a-story premise was already present in Gelber’s play), but the first 10 minutes or so of “The Connection” are decidedly awkward. Squaresville white filmmaker Jim Dunn (William Redfield) wanders around in his high-waisted chinos, trying to convince the group of crashed-out junkie hipsters to “act natural” and “be themselves,” and assuring them that he’s studied the documentaries of Robert Flaherty and knows what he’s doing. (A dig at the old-school variety of documentary film, before cinéma-vérité, I guess.) It’s clear that the addicts would rather relate to Dunn’s hipper African-American cameraman, J.J. Burden (an early role for future Hollywood character actor Roscoe Lee Browne), who is rarely seen but makes occasional oracular pronouncements.

In the interests of art, Dunn has apparently agreed to finance a major purchase from a smack dealer named Cowboy, but for most of the movie we are obviously encouraged to ponder the similarities between drug culture and Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” and to wonder whether Cowboy will ever show up at all. Prowling the dingy, open flat restlessly — it looks disconcertingly like a group household I actually lived in, 20-odd years ago — Clarke’s camera introduces us to the all-male assemblage, in fragmentary interviews. Leach (Warren Finnerty), a wiry, whiny fellow who looks and acts alarmingly like the young Steve Buscemi, is the official tenant. He is troubled by a painful boil on his neck, which may symbolize the fact that the other denizens suspect him of being gay. As his black friend Sam (Jim Anderson) will tell him later, he’d be more relaxed if he could “get with the whole homosexual scene.”

There’s also Ernie (Garry Goodrow), an embittered-genius West Coast white jazzman who has hocked his horn to buy junk, and Solly (Jerome Raphael), an educated, middle-class Jewish guy who has thrown it all away for philosophical reasons, or none at all. McLean, Redd, bass player Michael Mattos and drummer Larry Richie get fewer lines, but every so often pick up their instruments to deliver angled, edgy blasts of early-’60s hard bop. Today these characters would presumably be obsessed by some other cultural form — hip-hop or Scandinavian black metal or YouTube clips or hockey fights or something else I’ve never even heard of — and they’d be able to badger Cowboy with illiterate texts every few minutes. But they’d basically be the same guys; Gelber’s characters are drawn so sharply that many 21st-century viewers will identify people they know or used to know (perhaps even people they used to be).

When Cowboy finally arrives (played by Carl Lee, who would become Clarke’s longtime partner), he turns out to be the archetypal “hip Negro” in Ray-Ban shades, sporting a blazing white outfit and a messianic mien, and bringing with him an old-lady evangelist, as comic relief and cover story. He brings other kinds of blessings too, the kind that allow this cast of semi-lovable, self-destructive losers to get through another day. The central conflict faced by the characters in “The Connection” doesn’t have much to do with heroin, though — that too is a symbol or synecdoche. It goes way back before Clarke’s time, not to mention ours. If this film has something to say to us now — and I emphatically think it does — it’s about the costs and opportunities that come with “dropping out” of mainstream society, in the name of political-cultural-aesthetic rebellion. It asks a question that has no answer, one that every disgruntled young dreamer — every potential Shirley Clarke, of every generation — must face on her own.

“The Connection” is now playing at the IFC Center in New York, with other cities and DVD release to follow.

Personally, I can hardly get enough of the WTF/OMG/we-all-live-in-Plato’s-cave-my-mind-is-blown school of moviemaking. Not only was I a big fan of “The Matrix,” but to this day I will also defend the even nerdier “Matrix Reloaded,” Cornel West cameo and everything. (“Matrix Revolutions” — let’s all agree not to talk about that, OK?) One of my proudest achievements as a critic — and I’m not kidding about this, even a little bit — is that I wrote one of the very few positive reviews of “Donnie Darko” on its initial release, long before it became a dorm-room, bong-hit fave rave. Next week you’ll probably get to read me expounding on Jacques Rivette’s “Céline and Julie Go Boating,” which is a drug-addled continental meta-narrative exploration from 1974, and I know you just can’t wait.

I dig moderately cheesy sci-fi or horror that offers a peek behind the narrative curtain, like “Cabin in the Woods” or the underappreciated “Source Code,” and I’m a huge admirer of Austrian director Michael Haneke (“Caché,” “The White Ribbon,” “Funny Games”), who offers the chilliest, most art-housey version of porous-reality cinema. There’s Lynch, of course, and Christopher Nolan, of course, and we’ll discuss my reservations about both of them some other time. I’m not going to defend M. Night Shyamalan’s films on any grounds except sincerity and enthusiasm, but if I’m laid up with a bad cold or whatever, I’ll happily watch any of them. (I’m not counting “The Last Airbender.” OK, I’m not counting “The Village” either, it’s just too stupid. But anything else, even “Signs.”)

So I’m delighted to report that “Sound of My Voice,” a low-budget cult-thriller puzzle that made a splash at Sundance in 2011, proves how effectively you can set the mind-bending mood without any special effects, action sequences or spectral rabbits. On its most fundamental level, “Sound of My Voice” is an L.A. character drama built around the unresolved erotic tension between a tall, otherworldly-looking blonde named Maggie (Brit Marling), a nervous would-be documentary filmmaker named Peter (Christopher Denham), and Peter’s girlfriend Lorna (Nicole Vicius), a onetime Hollywood wild child gone straight. But when you throw in the fact that Maggie claims to be a time traveler from the year 2054, bringing word from a world half-destroyed by civil war and technological meltdown — and that Peter and Lorna have set out to expose and debunk her — things really get interesting.

Marling is a fascinating new arrival in movies, an actress with commanding screen presence who decided she could write roles better than the crappy ones agents were offering her. She co-wrote “Sound of My Voice” with first-time director Zal Batmanglij, at exactly the same time as she was writing another sci-fi indie, “Another Earth,” with Mike Cahill. That one also had a cool premise, and Marling is magnetic in both roles, but I think “Sound of My Voice” is far more compelling as storytelling, blending its enigmatic sci-fi elements with a creepazoid cult drama somewhat akin to “Martha Marcy May Marlene.”

Divided into numbered chapters that gradually heighten the tension, “Sound” presents a mystery that seems at first like hardly any mystery at all. Maggie’s coterie of followers are standard-issue California New Age seekers, dressed in white robes. They arrive blindfolded in her secret basement hideout somewhere in the San Fernando Valley, where she keeps them in line with tried-and-true psychological manipulation, mixed with nostrums from the future that are so vague as to be meaningless. (When she is finally coaxed into singing a hit song from the 2050s, a time when CDs and MP3s have almost ceased to exist, it turns out to be — well, no, I shouldn’t spoil it.)

But Maggie’s apparent lameness and fakeness is itself part of the mystery. Fraudulent or not, there’s no question that she’s a sexy and compelling woman, and there’s nothing false about the odd chemistry she strikes with the withdrawn and overly controlled Peter, or about Lorna’s mounting jealousy. And what about the chapters we don’t understand? What is the significance of the 8-year-old girl, a student of Peter’s at the private school where he’s a substitute teacher, who’s apparently suffering some kind of disturbing abuse? And what’s driving the mysterious female cop or secret agent (Davenia McFadden), who arrives in L.A. with a lot of puzzling gear hidden beneath a shopping bag, including a photograph that seems to be of Maggie?

All this is heading toward a dynamite denouement, which, for all the movie’s tense atmosphere and expert pacing, Batmanglij and Marling can’t quite pull off. I’m totally OK with irresolution and mystery, don’t get me wrong; the spinning top at the end of “Inception” is all good, and I don’t need to know for sure whether Maggie is an oracle of doom from the middle of the century or a tall drink of water running a delicious con. Maybe, in the quantum state of low-budget mind-melter cinema, she can be both! But “Sound of My Voice” has such creepy-crawly, brain-tickling energy that I wanted a much bigger payoff out of the final collision of all these people and episodes. (Go see the movie and come back; we’ll talk.) Maybe they’re saving that for the sequel. In which case, I’m mastering the secret handshake — there really is one — memorizing the lyrics of the surprising hit song, and getting in line.

“Sound of My Voice” is now playing in major cities.

If “Whores’ Glory” successfully resists romanticizing the lives of women who sell their bodies to make a living, Glawogger also does not surrender to what you might call the vulgar Marxist alternative, in which such women are interchangeable victims in a vast, mechanistic sexual economy, stripped of any agency or personality. Indeed, if there’s an ideological point (and a smidgen of hopefulness) to be found in “Whores’ Glory,” it lies in the film’s insistence that the women Glawogger meets in Thailand, Bangladesh and Mexico remain defiantly individual, even in the face of a system of sexual and economic exploitation they cannot (or at least do not) resist. Indeed, “Whores’ Glory” has a surprising double focus on the women’s economic lives and on their spiritual and religious pursuits. If one is inevitably reminded of Marx’s famous remark that religion is the opiate of the masses, one might also remember that his preceding comments were not nearly so harsh: “Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation.”

Right after that scene with the girls from the Fish Tank strutting over the Bangkok street, Glawogger introduces an extraordinary epigraph from Emily Dickinson, one that convinced me right away that this movie was something unusual. “God is indeed a jealous God,” Dickinson wrote. “He cannot bear to see/ That we had rather not with Him/ But with each other play.” Indeed, we have already seen brief vignettes of women in the three countries talking startlingly about their relationship to the divine. In Reynosa, a battered Mexican border city across the Rio Grande from McAllen, Texas, the street hookers all seem to pray to La Santissima Muerte (the Most Holy Death), a demonic female entity who seems to coexist with God and Jesus in their version of Roman Catholicism. In the City of Joy, a filthy warren of stone buildings in Faridpur, Bangladesh, a young woman tells the camera that she resists clients who demand oral sex by telling them that Allah did not make her mouth for that purpose; it is the mouth she uses to recite the suras of the Quran.

It’s details like those that make “Whores’ Glory” both a wrenching journalistic exploration of real life and something close to great cinema. This film, which took four years to complete, is the third installment in Glawogger’s series of documentaries about work in the era of globalization, which began in 1998 with “Megacities” and continued with “Workingman’s Death” in 2005. (I’m coming late to his work but what I’ve seen so far is absolutely remarkable — and you can see it for yourself in a retrospective that just concluded in New York and will soon reach other cities.) While the fluid camerawork of Wolfgang Thaler is never ostentatious, this film has considerable artistic ambition, with a score by Pappik & Regener (members of the German band Element of Crime) and soundtrack songs by PJ Harvey, CocoRosie and other indie-type artists. I suppose some viewers will find those ingredients intrusive or distracting, but sometimes the music (and Monika Willi’s remarkable editing) serve to create a little dreamlike distance from what we’re seeing on-screen. Without that distance, “Whores’ Glory” might be too difficult to sit through, quite frankly.

Compared with the dire conditions found in Faridpur and Reynosa, the women who work at the Fish Tank have almost middle-class lives. They live in modest but clean apartments, often have outside boyfriends, come to work by taxi, and punch in on a digital clock like industrial workers all over the world. On the other hand, the universal commodification of sexuality in Bangkok and the relentless capitalism of contemporary Asia seem to permeate almost every aspect of their lives. Perhaps it’s surprising that many of them spend their leisure hours hanging out with “bar boys” — coiffed and styled young men who work as prostitutes for an older female clientele — but on the other hand, this is a world where no one believes in romantic love, and everything is for sale.

In Bangladesh, social and religious taboos mean that the prostitutes generally won’t perform oral or anal sex (both of which are routinely available in Thailand). But the women of the City of Joy are virtual prisoners, often sold to madams after their first menstrual period and expected to live out their lives there, first as sex workers, then as madams and finally as servants. On the dusty back streets of Reynosa, where groups of profane, hard-bitten women turn tricks out of tiny sidewalk-level apartments, it’s a drive-by Darwinian free market for every possible sexual act or display, along with drugs, liquor and almost anything else that can be bought or sold. Both these sections of the film are tough to watch, at times, but Glawogger’s interviews with the prostitutes (and sometimes with their clients) always reveal things you aren’t expecting.

In Thailand and Bangladesh, what happens between the women and their johns remains behind closed doors, but in Reynosa, Glawogger persuades a prostitute and her client to let him film their interaction from beginning to end, an utterly businesslike encounter that’s about as sexy as buying half a pound of roast beef at the deli counter. It’s a moment of physical nakedness, but not nearly as revealing as when we see the same woman a bit later, smoking crack with a friend who is avidly trying to seduce her and talking about how visions of the Holy Death have eased her fear of mortality. There’s no judgment in “Whores’ Glory” — certainly not of the working women it depicts, and not even especially of their bewildered clients, who seem to vacillate from misogynist hostility to wistful romanticism and back again. There is, however, tremendous compassion, and more than a few moments of piercing clarity, as when a Bangladeshi hooker who looks no older than 15 tells Glawogger that women are fundamentally sad creatures. “Who can explain why this is true?” she wonders. “Is there no other path?”

“Whores’ Glory” is now playing at the Cinema Village and Lincoln Plaza Cinema in New York, and the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle. It opens May 25 in San Francisco, June 15 in Boston, June 22 in Philadelphia and July 6 in Atlanta and Washington, with other cities and home-video release to follow.

“Goodbye First Love” is a pretty good title for this film, but it sounds a bit more wistful and personal than the more detached French original, “Un Amour de Jeunesse.” It has almost no plot developments in the conventional sense, simply tracing the life of moody, soulful Camille (Créton, who does indeed resemble a younger Hansen-Løve) from age 15 to about 22, as she loves and then loses and then temporarily regains the slightly older, somewhat dumber but undeniably gorgeous Sullivan (Urzendowsky). While there is no explicit sex in the film and only a little nudity (especially by French standards), the whole thing — the bees and flowers and rivers, the lovers’ bodies, even the Parisian snow — virtually oozes libidinal energy. Hansen-Løve is trying to recapture that exaggerated, labile emotional state of the first love that changes you forever, but without mythologizing it or draping it in sentimental nostalgia.

What’s so striking about this movie from its very first frames is that Hansen-Løve has a fluid and dynamic command of the camera and a highly refined eye, and also that she views this avowedly autobiographical tale with an iron-willed resolve. You definitely can’t say she is cold toward her characters or actors — she bathes them in promiscuous, almost worshipful light — but one feels no intention to render Camille as the victim, or Sullivan as the perpetrator. Hansen-Løve just wants to show us how it was: They loved each other so intensely and burned so hot that it just wasn’t going to work out, and while her story is entirely specific, if you’ve lived on this planet long enough then you’ve had that feeling too.

Mostly she skips over the big dramatic moments, or underplays them. When Sullivan is leaving for the airport and Camille refuses to speak to him or even to look up from her face-down sobbing on the bed, he doesn’t know what to say or do, and simply walks out. I felt like I hated both of them at that moment, but what I was really feeling was a surprisingly intimate connection to how they both felt. I could tell you more about what happens in the movie, but that part doesn’t matter much. What matters is that the experience of watching it is so absorbing, from moment to moment, that I felt myself carried into Camille’s world and at the same time carried back into my own memories. One might add that if you’ve watched as many classic French films as Hansen-Løve clearly has, one may also feel carried, moment by moment, into the palace of Parisian love stories built by Truffaut and Rivette, Agnès Varda and Eric Rohmer, Philippe Garrel and André Téchiné.

Camille seems to want to devour Sullivan, body and soul, and partly in reaction to that and partly out of standard young-man wanderlust, he runs off to South America with his buddies and stops writing. She mourns for him, OD’s on sleeping pills, gets better, and moves on. She takes an architecture class, discovers a vocation, and moves in with the raffish Norwegian professor and star architect (gracefully played by Magne-Håvard Brekke) who’s at least twice her age. When Sullivan returns to Paris years later, Camille finds that her feelings haven’t changed, although her behavior certainly has. As Sullivan tells her, she is now an adult and an adulteress, cheating on a man she loves and who loves her.

Just in case you’re not up on French film-world gossip, much of this indeed seems to be drawn from life, and the resulting suppositions have set Parisians abuzz. Hansen-Løve broke into movies as the teenage star of “Late August, Early September,” a 1998 film by leading French director Olivier Assayas (now best known for his international hit “Summer Hours” and the explosive miniseries “Carlos”). Not long after that she became Assayas’ lover, despite their 26-year age difference, not to mention the fact that he was married to Chinese actress Maggie Cheung (who had starred in his “Irma Vep”) at the time. Hansen-Løve and Assayas have lived together for years and are reportedly engaged — but if Assayas is the real-life Norwegian-architect role model from “Goodbye First Love,” does that mean that Hansen-Løve cheated on him, early in their relationship, with a no-account but remarkably handsome former boyfriend?

It’s only human nature to wonder about that stuff, but I don’t know the answer and it makes no difference in watching “Goodbye First Love,” which is a gorgeous, commanding work of poetic realism that suggests Hansen-Løve may outdo her boyfriend. (At her age, Assayas had made only one feature, which wasn’t widely seen.) Haters gonna hate, as we say on this side of the Atlantic, and I’m sure some people suspect that Hansen-Løve got her chance because of her personal connections. But it’s what she’s done with that chance that matters, and she’s made a glorious, hot-cold Romeo and Juliet fable, one that conjures up the sweet agony of youthful romance with almost alchemical force.

“Goodbye First Love” is now playing in Los Angeles and New York, with a national rollout to follow. It will also available on-demand, beginning April 27, from many cable and satellite providers.